The right to vote for women: this is a given or victory in a long struggle

Going to the polling stations on election day, many modern women do not even think about how long and difficult was the journey done by millions of their predecessors. After all, they sometimes sacrificed everything to be given this opportunity - the right to vote. Women Traditionally it was deprived, and it is by no means taken for granted. Like other freedoms, this right has passed a long process of becoming, until it became universally recognized and enshrined in the constitutions of many developed countries. And reached this process of its apogee relatively recently: it's terrible to think, but even in the 40s of the twentieth century a Frenchwoman could not open a bank account without the consent of her husband, and only in 1946 she was admitted to the polling station.

In the era of the late Roman Empire, the woman inherited and owned property, and this is mentioned by Roman law. However, the interpretation of Christianity in Catholicism made the "daughter of Eve" guilty of original sin. It began to spread the view that a woman by nature is emotional, frivolous, stupid and simply can not control herself, but needs a patron - first a father and then a husband. So from the legal codes of Western European countries the right of a woman to own and completely dispose of property disappears. About what it was like to vote Among medieval women, the following historical fact testifies. When the Countess de Foix expressed her own arguments on the religious dispute in Pamiers in the early 13th century, the French cleric threw her in the face: "Mistress, go back to your spinning wheel!".

This disenfranchised position of the "weak" sex persisted until the Great French Revolution of 1789. Its slogan "Freedom, equality and brotherhood" was enthusiastically received by women who actively participated in all political processes. But with the publication of the main document of the Revolution of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the adoption of the republic's constitution, they found that these beautiful slogans do not concern them, but only men. Olympia de Gouge, a writer, in 1791 made the "Declaration on the Rights of the Citizen" - the first manifesto of feminism. But the government did not meet half the population of the republic, on the contrary, all women's unions were banned, and the "second floor" was not even allowed to attend public events, equating it to children and the insane. Olympia de Guja finished her life on the guillotine. But the Frenchwomen were not alone in their struggle for the right to vote.

Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792 published in London, his work "In Defense of Women's Rights", which proves the need for equality of both sexes. And suffragism - the movement for the right to vote for women - was born in the United States. This happened in 1848. In 1870, the women of Great Britain collected three million signatures under the petition for the right to elect and be elected. They submitted this paper to the parliament for consideration.

But the first country in which women received, finally, voting right, Became New Zealand - in 1893. Later victory in this issue was achieved in Australia (1902), the United States (1920), Great Britain (1928). In Russia, only the October Revolution brought equality to women .

The legal documents of many countries of the Muslim world still have provisions that a woman is not an independent member of society. In some states she does not have a passport at all, being inscribed before her marriage in the father's document, and after it - in the husband's passport. This situation is largely caused by the problems of migrants who live in Western European countries and the US in closed communities.